The invention relates generally to a dental floss tool and more particularly to a dental floss tool which is compact and provides tangle free storage of dental floss therein.
Although a variety of dental floss tools exist in the marketplace, many of them suffer from a number of faults. Typical among them is that they require a great deal of dental floss to be used when employing the tool or that the tool is relatively complicated and expensive to manufacture. Typical among such prior art devices is that disclosed in U. S. Pat. No. 4,004,599 to Rosenfeld which discloses a dental floss holder having a rotatable dental floss reel confined therein from which a length of dental floss may be extracted and extended over a pair of arms for use. One of the problems with such a device is that a rapid pull on the dental floss to unreel it from the spool can lead to jamming within the dental floss holder. In addition, the arms 21 and 22 are not flexible which makes it relatively difficult to tension the dental floss across the gap 26. Also, another problem is that while a button 25 is available on one of the arms 22 to anchor one end of the dental floss, the other end of the dental floss remains relatively free to move being inhibited only by the frictional engagement of the toothed wheel 12.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,378,017 to Stiles discloses a relatively complicated dental floss device which has been embodied in a commercial device. In that device a number of moving parts are employed and tension is maintained on the dental floss by trapping it between a pair of movable sections of the dental floss applicator. The device would appear to be quite expensive to manufacture.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,171,177 to De L'Eau discloses a dental floss holder having a fixed supply of floss arranged in a coil 22. However, the device is quite complicated to manufacture as the moveable arms 11 and 12 are pivoted at a hinge mechanism 10.
What is needed then is a dental floss tool or holder which is economical, easy to use and provides firm anchoring of the dental floss during use.